This Astro Boy-influenced Animated Sci-Fi Is A Feast For The Eyes

Arco (Juliano Valdi) flies through the air faster than the speed of light in a skin-tight pink suit with a rainbow-colored cloak. He’s just spent the day tending to his family farm when his parents (America Ferrera and Roeg Sutherland) return from traveling from afar. Very afar, as it turns out, into the prehistoric past, alongside the triceratops. It’s the far, far future, except Ugo Bienvenu’s film, named after its precocious young protagonist, has the distinct retro-futuristic animation style of the 1950s. Here, amongst the sky-scraping, treehouse-style homes way above into the clouds, humanity has perched itself away from the now-fully underwater Earth.

The boy has, against governmental policy which stipulates that children under the age of 12 are forbidden from flight, stolen his sister’s cloak and shot himself into the nighttime sky. But he loses control fast, crash-landing through time and space into the forest, in the year 2075, where Iris (Romy Fay) has stolen away from her robot-operated school. While Arco’s society has elevated itself out of the grasp of rising sea levels, Iris’s is plagued by near-constant extreme weather patterns. And, in these two far-flung time periods, Bienvenu extrapolates a tale of discovery and survival out of the same problems that haunt us in 2025.

Arco Uses Its Animation Style To Urge Us Towards A Rare Climate Optimism

Couched in a tale of young love and self-discovery, Arco is nakedly hopeful despite its more loaded implications. The animation style hearkens back to a time of scientific optimism, when the world watched in disbelief as humans walked the moon. It invokes Star Trek, The Jetsons, Astro Boy, and other such media texts that assumed space travel would only open us up to further exploration. And through that stylization, Bienvenu naturally suggests that, if we can’t immediately solve the problems of oncoming climate change, we at least have the tools to push society forward.

That is, if we avoid the pitfalls of over-reliance on technological advancement. As soon as Arco finds himself in 2075, it becomes clear that our world, 50 years on from today, has not solved its problems but merely learned to live amongst catastrophe. One day, it’s severe flooding, another uncontrollable blazes of fire. Nearly everything has been outsourced to humanoid artificial intelligence. Iris’s parents (Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo) are away on an extended work trip and so hologram themselves in for dinner, letting their at-home robot, Mikki (simultaneously voiced by the same two actors) take care of domestic duties.

Iris’s teachers? Also robots. Custodians, garbage collectors, fire-fighters, grocers: all robots. In order to protect against violent weather, homes and buildings encase themselves in massive, translucent domes. People still get the mail, but no one checks their mailboxes, Iris tells Arco, because all you get is bad news. But not everything has fallen away. People still shop at stores, for example, which blows Arco’s mind. In his time, all homes are self-sufficient. Even if we can survive the end times, what do we sacrifice by isolating ourselves even further from nature?

Arco is desperate to get back to his time period, but, in his fall, a crucial piece of his time travel suit was dislodged: a light-refracting jewel. Without it, Arco can’t travel back unless there is that rarest of weather, where the sun shines through heavy rain. Iris does all she can to help Arco on his journey, including artificially creating the weather needed for his flight. She sets off a ton of sprinklers during a particularly sunny day, but it doesn’t work.

The only real villain besides circumstances is a group of three buffoonish brothers, Dougie, Stewie, and Frankie (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, respectively). The trio, dressed in pastel suits with matching turtlenecks and massive triangular sunglasses, has been hunting down the source of the mysterious shooting rainbows in the sky for decades. Harmless and stupid, they nonetheless pose a consistent problem for the two young kids.

With the town doomsday-prepping for an oncoming firestorm, Iris and Arco try to hunt down the jewel. As their journey brings them into contact with both the authorities and the brotherly trio, they bond with each other over a love of birds and a mutual hope for better worlds. Through them, Bienvenu paints a rosy picture of the idealism of youth. But it isn’t all love and roses, as Mikki’s very presence suggests the inherent issues with projecting emotional connections onto machinery.

The end of Arco asks us to heed a warning about ignoring the perils of climate collapse. But the film, as bleak as that suggests, also imagines a future’s future of a society built on familial and communal care. In its gorgeous animation and stylization of motion blur, Arco pleads us to return to a time when we dreamt about the future as hidden through fluffy clouds and resplendent rainbows.

Arco is in theaters on November 14.